


Drift Margin

by jinlian



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: AU, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-24 10:12:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlian/pseuds/jinlian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’ve already lost everything there is to lose, Ranger. So you can plug yourself in and trust just one person in this world, you can stand and fight in the cockpit of a jaeger, or you can wait for the kaiju to chew you up and shit you out.” (Legend of Korra/Pacific Rim AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

_When my brother and I were kids, our parents used to wake us up late in the night to look out at the stars. We used to talk about what it would be like up there, looking down below and free of everything but each other—and, of course, as my brother and I had to wonder, whatever other life might be out there, too._

_We always thought alien life would come from the stars. But as it turned out, we were looking in the wrong direction._ _When alien life entered our world it was from the deep beneath the Pacific Ocean: a fissure between two tectonic plates, a portal between the dimensions. A breach._

 _I was eight years old when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco._ _By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down, six days and thirty five miles later, three cities were destroyed. Tens of thousands of lives were lost. We mourned our dead, memorialized the attack, moved on. And then, only six months later, a second attack hit Manila_. _And then the third hit Cabo. Then we learned this was not going to stop. This was just the beginning._

_Something out there had discovered us. They counted on the humans to hide, to give up, to fail; and at first we almost did. They never considered our ability to stand, to endure, that we would rise to the challenge._

_It came from a young lieutenant in the Canadian Forces—a man by the name of Sokka Ota. Nobody wanted to listen at first. In order to fight monsters, he said, we needed monsters of our own. A new weapon. Man linked to a giant machine, able to feel everything it felt. I know—it sounded crazy. Everyone else thought so, too. So at first no one listened. But then we got desperate._

_The German mechanist who took the task of designing these machines called them_ jaegers _: it means "hunter." It didn't start off too well, though. The jaegers were so huge, so complex, that the strain it took on the human brain to stay connected was too much. The whole thing might have been forgotten if it hadn't been for one kid, just a Tibetan Buddhist monk who said that the problem was the idea that everything was individual—that the solution lay within each other. A dual-pilot system: right hemisphere, left hemisphere. Minds and memories melded as one to share the neural load of the jaeger, the self forgotten so that no one had to face the kaiju alone. That kid was in the first jaeger ever to take down a kaiju._

 _The Jaeger Program exploded. After the Dragon Dancer, there was the Tundra Boomerang, the Kyoshi Warrior, the Bandit Boar, the Chakra Blue. It wasn't just enough to keep them from finding us, now._ _In the jaegers, we could stop their attacks before they hit hard. We started winning; the jaegers stopped invasions everywhere. But the jaegers were only as good as their pilots, so jaeger pilots turned into rock stars. The danger turned into propaganda, kaijus into toys. We got really good at it—winning._

_Then everything changed._

_Jaegers started falling faster than we could build them. Kaiju were adapting, using better strategy, showing different attacks. We just couldn't keep up. They broke through the coastal walls—smashed city after city and finally, we decided, the only thing left to do was retreat as far as we could go and try to find a place the kaiju couldn't follow._

_Not the jaegers, though. Everything that was left, it's their job to keep the kaiju out for as long as they could. So the pilots and the jaegers remain on the shoreline. There are lots of people in the world, after all, and they can't go at once. Someone's gotta protect them._

_It's all just temporary, though. Sooner or later, there'll be nothing left to hold them back. And when that day comes… we have no idea what we're gonna do._

\-----

The world for hours has been nothing but fear, of dust and dirt and the screams of people as they ran. Now, though, it is silence, but for the rush of blood in her ears and the heavy rush of breath against the glass that fogs up her vision.

_Breathe._

It's the one word she can remember, and she clings to it, the line to keep her head above the darkness that swims just below her vision. It's the chant she uses to time her ever step, her every swing; it's a command her lungs obey over the promise of rest in the drifting blue. She wants to _live._

She just can't remember why.

_Breathe._

Her body is not her own any more; it is so much more than that. She can feel the uneven surface against her feet despite her steps on cold hard metal, feel the crunch of flesh and bone in her hands though she holds nothing there. And she can feel the ground as it rises to meet her, until her head hits stone and silence turns into blackness.

_"Breathe, Korra—"_

\-----

"Korra."

A bare-tipped finger touches her cheek, gently pulling at her lower eyelid, and she jerks, whole body twitching and eyes flying wide. The culprit's hand drops from her face to her shoulder. "It's all right," he says. "Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"

She licks her lips and tastes chapped skin and dried blood. "I… yes," she replies as she blinks, squints around the room to make sense of things. The room is pristine, crisp white sheets and pale blue walls, and, most tellingly, the _beep, beep, beep_ of a monitor by her side. She's clearly in a hospital, but she cannot remember what she has done to earn herself a stay.

His gaze is level as he watches her, looking for something, it seems—just for a moment. "Do you know why?"

She lets her attention rest on him: his head perfectly shaved without even a stubble, the full beard that made up for the lack of hair on top, his pressed royal blues, the bronze pins and ribbons along his chest, the winged symbol on his chest. It's a symbol she knows but not one she can place, a symbol that should, she thinks, belong emblazoned on steel, five times her size— _tattooed on arms she raised high above her head, arms that came crashing down on the head that ripped, that tore at her chest, that tried to bring her down, down, down—_

"Because I fought a kaiju," she says, and pain lances through her head so intense that when it fades to a dull throbbing in her skull she cannot keep herself from shaking.

He sits down on her bed, hands curled in his lap as he turns to look her square in the eyes. "Miss Grey, you did more than fight that kaiju. You killed it."

And despite the trembling, she smiles.

"I don't know what happened out there, but I do know this: that was not your jaeger to drive. One of Naga Siren's pilots is still alive, however, and she's told me that she fell unconscious the moment her copilot was killed. That jaeger was down. That means that you entered it on your own, linked with a fallen jaeger on your own, and piloted a victory _on your own."_

She isn't listening. _I'm a pilot,_ is the only thought in her head—the newsreels and cheering crowds of her childhood only the backgrounds. She even owns a pair of Chakra Blue sneakers, somewhere home in her closet.

"You are twelve years old, let alone untrained," he continues, and the knuckles on his hand turn white as he clenches them tighter together. "By all rights you should be dead, but what's done is done, and it doesn't look as though we have a choice."

Cheering— _or was it screaming—people running but the kaiju running faster, and Korra was alone, her parents still, she thought, at work. And worse, she watched the jaeger fall: but when the crowd ran, she went forwards, full of the urge to see and the urge to fight and the urge to_ _ **live.**_

_"Miss Grey."_

She's pulled back to earth by his voice, her breath short in her throat as she twists a shaking hand in her hospital blanket. The ranger stands again; whether he's aware of her lack of attention to him or whether he's simply agitated, she can't tell, but she looks at him straight. "This is a serious matter. I am Marshall Tenzin Gyaltsen of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, and unfortunately because of your inability to understand _why_ all our pilots go through intense training before they step _foot i_ n a jaeger, you are required to make an immediate move to the shatterdome in Anchorage. I've already spoken with your parents, and they understand why this is necessary."

He says it like it's a punishment. "I killed a _kaiju,"_ Korra says through her grin, "and I s _aved lives,_ and you gotta deal with it."

"That is not—!" The Marshall catches himself halfway through his retort, a whirl on the soles of his polished shoes. He swipes a hand over his beard, gave it a tug; with one deep breath, he tries again. "Korra, listen to me."

She does, but she does not stop smiling.

"You plugged yourself into a jaeger alone with an untrained, immature brain. It's a mystery how you survived, but the neural load it took on your body has not gone without consequence." He quiets; Korra's smile slips, just a little. "You will be a ranger candidate, Miss Grey. But you will never be able to take the force of a jaeger on your own again, or you will die."

Death is not a concept Korra has ever seriously had to consider—not any twelve-year-old, really, since the invention of the jaeger. And yet she'd already faced it, before in the cockpit of the Naga Siren and now, as Tenzin stares at her over her hospital bed, grey eyes meeting blue. Still, death is only word; that's all it would ever be.

Tenzin tugs on his beard, once more. "You've already proven you're willing to do something so obviously harebrained," he says, his shoulders drawn together—just slightly. As though an attempt to soften the announcement of Korra's relocation to a shatterdome and inevitable death, or perhaps to drive it home, he adds, "This is for your own protection, more than anything."

And then he is gone, his shoes clicking on the linoleum far down the hallway where she can still hear. Korra takes a breath, deep, and sucks in air between her teeth; she feels her lungs fill and swell before she raises a shaking hand and covers her face. Against the palm of her hand the world is dark, and she can focus on tasting air, on the quiet, persistent beep of the monitor by her side that assures her that her heart is still beating. And yet something feels wrong—not the pain in her head or the limbs she couldn't keep from trembling, but something in her chest, like there's a hollow between her heart and her lungs but she doesn't know what belonged.

She isn't left alone, not for long. A blue-clad nurse enters her room after hearing she's awake to check her memory, that she remembers who she is and where she's from. Her parents come next to hold her close and cry—that they are so happy to see her alive, so proud of what she has done, and Korra hides her face in her father's shoulder and holds on tight because soon they will be gone.

But at the end of it all, only one thought remains in Korra's mind: _she is going to pilot jaegers._


	2. one

Mako’s helmet bounces on the gated metal floor and rolls few inches before being kicked by the feet that stand in his line of vision, the view with which he’s greeted as he gasps for air and opens his eyes. “What the  _hell,”_ he hears, and he lets his head drop to the floor almost hard enough to bruise.

_"Pilots disengaged."_

Heavy footsteps echo through the cockpit, but Mako remains lying where he is until a hand grabs his shoulder and jerks him upright. Somebody tugs at his eyelid; Mako pushes, rubs a forearm over his face instead. There’s a pounding just behind his temples, but otherwise he feels fine—he only doesn’t want to be touched, hands cold against his body that begs, as he lies on the ground, for a moment to itself. Mako listens instead, keeps his gaze down and watches feet pace back and forth across the ground loud taps and clunks that reverberate against his skull and in his ears. These are not memories, they tell him. This he can share.

 _"What the hell,"_ he hears again, repeated from further away this time. The voice is louder than necessary in the small space of the cockpit, even above the whirls of machinery and the murmur of the A.I. as it shuts itself down. Mako needs to time to place it. “Did you see what happened? Because I sure didn’t. I told you this would—”

"Shut the hell up, Hasook," Mako says loudly, and his mouth is so dry that his voice almost cracks.

He places gloved hands beside him and pushes himself up now, once again shrugging off assistance from the J-Tech officer kneeling beside him.  _“Get them out of there,”_ he thinks he hears; but the world is unsteady, a reel of blues and blacks, and he sets his feet and lets the film play.

Hasook hasn’t left the cockpit, his helmet dangling from two crooked fingers on his right hand. “I could have been  _wiped,”_ he complains, and just for an instant Mako hears the screech of leather and talon, and he thinks that this way, at least, Hasook would have died without screams on his lips.

"Good thing you weren’t, then," Mako mutters instead. He wipes a hand across his mouth, where a copper tang wells against his tongue before being spat onto the ground.

In the end, attempting a neural drift with Hasook had been a pointless exercise, the rounds run by J-Tech and LOCCENT for no other reason than they had no team for the only jaeger left operating in Japan. It had been an act of desperation, though, founded on a essential similarity in the drift candidates: memories of rings of people, fists wrapped in white tape dirtied with mud and blood and coins tossed in bets at their feet—a fighting style only one other candidate shared.

Desperation, however, does not guarantee compatibility.

The J-Tech officers shuffle them out of the cockpit before any retort can be made, and Mako gazes over the heads of technicians bent over equipment, over the LOCCENT officer that grips his arm and the medic that rushes towards them. No other trainees, he notes; and with that, a pocket of air released from his lungs, he deflates. Hasook has stopped talking, at least for the moment, resigned to a sullen turn of his lips and arms crossed over his chest as the medic gives him attention.

"Where is the marshall?" Mako asks.

"Mission Control." A technician fumbles with his drivesuit, fingers slipping as they pry and lift the pieces. "You’re to report immediately."

It’s the catch and tug of the battle armor against his circuitry suit, the unusually clumsy handling of the clips and snaps, that alerts Mako to a sense of wrong. In a drivesuit room, where pilots would already be on their way to meet the source of an emergency, there is no need for a siren or flash of alert; but in Tokyo, where even a jaeger without pilots is a luxury, an emergency is more than just the bells and whistles of a nighttime launch. He wriggles free of the suit as soon as the armor is removed (the lockers are only at the end of the hallway—not far to pick up his clothes, anyway) and is only just pulling his t-shirt over his head as he enters the command center.

Marshall Toza Bogdanovic is a man permanently bent by his own muscles, built and scarred under the weight of metal and the world. Mako spots him easily through the colors of the glowing maps and graphs. Bogdanovic stands over the shoulder of a seated LOCCENT officer as he stares, face pinched, at something that flashes red in front of them, while near him is a much younger man, hands locked behind his back and almost cowed in his simple cotton shirt and pants next to the marshal. He’s the first to notice Mako’s arrival—green eyes meet hazel, and Mako nods.

“Iwamoto!”

Bogdanovic doesn’t look up from the map he so closely examines, and both boys start forward in response.

“Not you, Bolin, you’re right where I can see you—” The Marshall turns to Mako at last. “Get right back in the suit, you. I want the Iwamoto brothers ready for a neural handshake in half an hour.”

It takes Mako a moment to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth before he can respond. “Sir—”

 _“Sir!”_  someone else shouts instead, louder than Mako’s throaty mumble, “We’ve just lost communication with Panama City. Bearclaw has Basco Thunder pushed within one hundred yards of the shatterdome—accessing satellite visuals now.”

“Biantai is looking to make land near Unggi.” The officer sitting by Bolin and Toza fiddles with his control panel; the blue holograms swivel, and Mako can make out the coastline of Korea and northern China. “With Vladivostok out of commission, it’ll be a clear path to Harbin, with plenty of towns not yet emptied on its way.”

Toza slams the heels of his palms on the control panel, the muscles around his mouth strained. “Contact Hong Kong, get Gyaltsen talking. Ito, what’s the status in Panama City?”

Blue flashes over Mako’s shoulder, and he turns to watch the holographic image of the ruined walls of the Panama City shatterdome as a kaiju stomps on by the fallen jaeger. The visual is silent; the meaning is not.

“Jesus Christ,” Toza says, and his low voice cracks.

Quiet lasts only for a moment. Toza turns then to Mako, who stands where he has not moved in minutes, too hot for the chill of the room and throat too dry. “Is there a reason you’re still here, Iwamoto?”

And here he’s content to wait while Mako, through a silence louder than the whirs of the machines and shouted updates, struggles to find an answer. Bolin, in his brother’s place, leans forward on his toes— _”Let’s do this, Mako—”_  But though Mako’s jaw moves as though he is going to talk, he makes no sound. The radio speaks instead.

_“This is Marshall Tenzin Gyaltsen, Hong Kong Shatterdome One. Lepus Himalaya deployed en route to Unggi, expected interception in five hours.”_

Toza does not look away from Mako, not right away. His gaze lingers, as though searching for an answer—and then, without looking away, he responds, “This is Marshall Toza Bogdanovic. No launch out of Tokyo, continue standard procedure.”

* * *

 

It’s almost a two full days before news reaches Tokyo that Bearclaw and Biantai have been killed and the pilots of both the Lima and Hong Kong jaegers mostly unhurt. Neither escape without technical damage, however—and Toza, with the backdrop of a jaeger’s amber-glassed eyes through the doors of the launchpad, knows without preamble what it means when the Grand Marshall steps onto the helipad on the roof of the Tokyo shatterdome.

“We have to shut you down,” Tenzin tells him.

Toza sighs and locks his hands behind his neck, leans back in his chair and stares at the water-damaged spots on the concrete walls just above Tenzin’s head. “Thirty years ago, I marched off to battle just outside that window,” he says, and he can still hear the roar of waves and the dying breaths of a kaiju.

Tenzin shifts and does not look Toza in the eyes. “You know if we had the resources of the old days—”

He lets the front legs of his chair drop back to the ground with a thunk. “I’m too old for all that, now.” Toza runs a hand over his balding crown. “I get it, Grand Marshall. The kaiju keep learning. They keep hitting double events and taking our jaegers down. And until those idiots who think it’ll work at least start to build a wall with the human population inland, we have to keep making the repairs to hold them off. And Tokyo’s expendable.”

“It’s a near-empty island nation,” Tenzin says quietly, as though his explanation is an apology. “You have a jaeger that you don’t launch and technology that takes money, and—well, we have a plan. A final line of offense with all the last jaegers and rangers we can gather.”

Toza looks away again, down at his hands, thumbs over the wood grains on his desk. A plan, he thinks—not against the kaiju, who let them have the upper hand only long enough to feel safe—it’s only a delay. Better to have the delay than nothing, though,at least it’s a bit of hope in this hellhole, and he takes a long breath before he speaks. “I hope your plan includes piloting that jaeger. We’ll be down to Lima and Hong Kong and we’re not exactly crawling with recruits eager to jump in a machine with a 60% chance of failure—even the recruits we have won’t pilot it. Two brothers with tests so high but won’t even drift and a third who just quit. Good luck with that one.”

“We have a few extra rangers on hand, but—what do you mean, brothers who won’t drift?”

“One brother’s the better phrasing.” Toza shakes his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. They signed up together three or so years back, passed all the tests and scored compatible, but the moment we suggested trying out a real drift the older one said he wouldn’t. Don’t know what he thinks will happen, but there must be something down that RABIT-hole he doesn’t want chased.”

Tenzin sighs, places his palms on Toza’s desk and pushes—the legs of the chair scrape, grate, against the concrete floor, and he stands. “We can’t afford to let anyone go, not with rangers just as scarce as everything else. Let them come—they may find someone else, and if anything, we always have Lin to get them into shape.”

The old marshall stands too. He reaches, extending an arm to clasp Tenzin’s forearm in one firm shake: “Good luck, Gyaltsen,” Toza says, and he knows that soon there will be no one left but him.

* * *

 

Since the first kaiju landing nearly fourteen years earlier, rain has become the pan-Pacific standard weather—some effect of the so-called “Kaiju Blue” phenomenon, perhaps, or, according to the more superstitious, earth’s cry for the future. Mako thinks it fitting as he rests his forehead against the cool glass of the helicopter window and watches the wide expanse of ocean roll beneath them. Bolin sleeps, his head tucked against his chest, and the Hong Kong skyline grows closer ahead; but Mako keeps his gaze below. The sea is not quiet, smooth nowhere he can see from horizons across, but nor does it toss and roar. It rumbles, prowls, disturbed only by the pounding rain, and he wonders just what waits beneath the surface. Would they know it was coming if monsters from their dreams and memories rose to greet them?

It is, as it turns out, a question with blessedly no answer. The grey waters below only roll over beneath them to give way to the expanse of blacktop and crowded umbrellas below. Mako leans over and nudges his brother’s shoulder as the helicopter hovers and slowly drops. Bolin lets out a low groan, shifts and throws an arm over his eyes.

"Bro," Mako says, "wake up. We’re here."

Bolin jerks upright, and both unclip their belts and shrug canvas backpacks over their shoulders, all they need to carry their belongings in a move from one country to another. “It’s bigger than the one in Tokyo,” Bolin shouts over the helicopter blades as they power down, and he steps out into the weather.

The hangar is full of people running: some attempting to push box-laden carts twice their size, some with coat jackets held over their heads, others with umbrellas who race for closing double doors, but all around is a sense of people’s fleeing. Only one slows amidst the rush, boots splashing through the puddles as she turns her collar up against her face.

"You must be the Iwamoto brothers," she says in Japanese, and she holds out a hand that takes Mako a moment to realize he’s supposed to take. "I’m Asami Sato, of J-Tech. I’ll be showing you around."

Her eyes are green, a single flash of color against the drear of the hangar and the rain. “Sato?” Mako echoes, rolling the name on his tongue. “Not— _you’re_  not  _the_  Sato heading the Jaeger Restoration Program, are you?”

She smiles. “No, that’s my dad. But I do plenty of work, myself. Speed and gadget upgrades, that’s all me.”

The announcement has a profound effect on Bolin, who speaks in tones no less loud than earlier through the drone of the helicopter and the roar of the waves:  _“Wow!”_ he exclaims, and he steps forward with only a readjustment of the backpack slung over one shoulder so he can stand straighter. “Are we going to get to see that up close?”

Mako listens, only half-heartedly, as she leads them inside the high concrete walls and points out places or names: the combat room that way, tanks on their way to K-Science, rangers on their ways to and from training. Bolin keeps up at her side, an animated receiver to her every word, and Asami listens and laughs; Mako watches, instead, the tumble of her black curls, keeps his eyes on the heels of her shoes and the tracks of the floor they walk.

He looks up only when the doors slide open to a room at least twice as large as what Mako thought encaptured the whole shatterdome from the outside. All the people fleeing from the docks must have come here, he thinks; he nearly trips three times as people shove and hustle through the crowds, and when Mako looks to his left, he nearly stops dead at the jaeger that rises, menacing, above the room. Its chest is pried open and a third arm hangs suspended by cranes at its side, precipitous, and Mako worries that it will fall.

“The marshall is that way.” Asami is pointing, and he pulls his gaze away from the red-orange glow of the jaeger’s core to see where she is leading. “I have to meet my father to inspect a new shipment from the inland, but if you need anything, you can usually find me in the control room or in Kwoon Combat.” She leans back on her heels, twists her hair over her shoulders with a quirk of her mouth. “I’m not a pilot, but Dad likes to make sure I’m still sharp, no matter what.”

Bolin is slicking his hair back and waving goodbye when he gives Mako a huge, hard elbow the the chest. Mako doubles over, wraps his arms around his stomach—”Bro, what the—?!”—but Bolin is already hurrying forward, dragging Mako behind him.

“That’s not Korra Grey, is it?” he asks, and Mako finally sees what he thinks he’s supposed to see.

The Grand Marshall is even taller than Mako, who stands just over six feet, and with his shaven head and PPDC blues he cuts an intimidating figure. Next to him, though, is someone much smaller, her hair pulled back and dog tags swinging as she gestures something emphatic. Hers  _is_  a recognized face, Mako realizes with some shock—one he’s seen on television, even years before, blue eyes against brown skin and arms that look as though they alone could hold back a kaiju’s claw.

_A child who crawled into a jaeger—_

The conversation does not seem to be a pleasant one. The marshall’s face is almost a purple against the pale of his skin, and Mako can hear the end of the argument in English as they approach.

“—else here even comes close to what I can do and have done, you can’t tell me I need—”

“Korra, we are not having this discussion right now!” Marshall Gyaltsen cuts her off over the rest of the crowd that hustle by, and she opens her mouth to protest. “In fact, we’re not having it at all. My decision is final, and you  _will listen.”_

She clenches her fists and continues to glare at Gyaltsen even when he notices Mako and Bolin and turns to greet them; Mako keeps his eyes on her instead of the marshall, too, as she makes no indication of drawing to attention at their arrival. “Misters Iwamoto,” Gyaltsen says, and he dips his head briefly in response to the brothers’ short bows. “Welcome to Hong Kong. Walk with me.”

He takes over where Asami left, polished shoes clicking against the hangar bay floor. Mako looks over his shoulder, and Korra follows, sullen, her arms crossed over her chest as she kicks her feet while she walks. “I don’t expect this is very like what you’re accustomed.”

“Well, our father was from Shanghai,” Bolin says, “so at least we can understand Mandarin, even though I suppose most people speak English and Cantonese instead—”

Tenzin turns to look at him, one eyebrow furrowed, before quickening his pace once again. “Yes, well… that’ll all be good, though I meant life at the shatterdome, itself. Don’t let four jaegers and a few hundred people fool you: we’re at the end of our rope here. We’re a resistance, not an army, but you’re here because it’s time to build one. And that means you’ll be going back to work.”

Korra perks up for the first time at that, taking two quick steps to close the gap between herself and the group. “I’ll make sure they know what to expect,” she offers, a lilt in her voice as she raises one eyebrow and lifts her chin. “It’ll be easy enough to lead them through orientation before we turn them over to Beifong.”

“Ranger Grey.” Tenzin stops and turns, almost spinning on his heels, and Mako notes the change in address. Korra seems to notice it as well, as she straightens in response, drawing her shoulders back and dropping her arms. “You will make sure to spend just as much time as everyone else training while we make final preparations. There will be no ‘turning over,’ not when you still have things to improve, as well.

“But you won’t even  _tell_  me what final—!”

It sounds like the beginning of a much-repeated argument, and Tenzin seems to think so, too, as he begins walking again before Korra can finish. “If you can sustain a connection without putting any lives in danger, then we’ll have this conversation again, Ranger.”

Something tenses in Korra’s face, a blanch in her eyes and a twist of her lips. There’s a piece missing, Mako thinks, that he should know, and he strains to remember the newsreels, the interviews, the fallen jaegers and humanity pushed to the brink; but he can only remember the blink of blue eyes and a tiny figure against the backdrop of a monster.

“Breakfast is served at 0530…”

Once again Mako turns off one ear and leans back against the flow of movement and information, the passing of time before his eyes. Bolin walks by Tenzin’s side with a question for everything, and Korra—a set to her jaw and a gaze that never settles, as though searching for a place to jump—vanishes into the hangar crowd. But Mako settles back in his memories, dim television screens and looming bodies.

And when they leave the noise of hangar bay into the close, bare walls of the bunker wing, his body lets it go.


	3. two

When Korra Grey wakes up, she does not remember who she is.

A single candle sputters its last light against the plain concrete walls as Korra counts her breath and stares, a hand curled over her left eye. The candlelight struggles to climb the ceiling, and Korra watches through her fingers as she pays attention to the swelling of her chest with each breath, the beat of her heart against her ribs and the long, slow stream of air she lets out through her nose. There’s no other sound but the quiet ticking of her clock beside her bed. Korra breathes in, holds for seven seconds, and breathes out.

The images running through her head are stark against the dim light in her room, and she blinks slowly, trying to discern dream, memory, and reality. She thinks she’s looking at a ceiling on which she’s plastered dozens of PPDC posters and news cut-outs from over the years, but she could be lying awake in the dead of night in either Hong Kong or in Anchorage. Maybe that ceiling is a blue-painted bedroom in Seattle, a bad paint job that her parents just can’t afford to redo. Or maybe the coarse brown and grey is that of the launch room in Panama, where she’ll step inside the sweeping helm of her ride, lock into the black and steel workings of a too-warm cockpit and stare out the eyes of one monster into another. Korra is torn between who and where, between the still, silent nights in the shatterdome and a twitch that makes her whole body  _jerk_  so hard she trips. She throws out her arms to catch herself—but what meets her, instead, is the horrible, tearing sharpness along her side, a scream that sounds like the screech of metal, and helplessness to move to stop it.

She gasps.

 _Again,_  Korra thinks, and closes her eyes. Was that one of her own memories, this time, or someone else’s? It’s getting harder and harder to tell.

She needs a full sixty seconds to slow her heart rate, breathing deeply and loudly at the ceiling before she swings her legs over the edge of the bed and stands. She’s still only half-awake, blinking at the heavy door across from her bunk. The LED lights on the clock tell her it’s only 4:03 in the morning. There are too many unsettled images in her head, memories she cannot place, and the only way to shake them will be to dosomething.

Korra eyes her unlaced boots, thrown unceremoniously on the cold floor of her room. Well—a walk it is, then. 

She leaves the boots on the floor, even after she pulls on the same pair of black cargo pants from last night and yanks a too-large white t-shirt over her unbrushed hair. Instead she curls bare toes against the cold floor, concrete just like the walls and puddled with water trickling from cracks along the edges. She does not mind the wet.

Waking up like this is tiring, but an old habit that’s helped her to memorize every edge and thrown pile of clothing in her bunker even in the barely-penetrable darkness of pre-sunrise Hong Kong. A single light is visible on this floor of the shatterdome, shining out of room with a half-cracked door about halfway down the hall off the west side wing. Korra navigates her way without a trip through the ghostly concrete halls. She guesses, even before she arrives, that she will find Asami Sato, half bent over a pile of tech and her long hair clipped to fall flawlessly away from her face as she works.

She is mostly right: Korra does see Asami in the brightly-lit room (too bright, after the darkness of the rest of the hallways—Korra blinks hard, squinting and raising a hand to cover her eyes as she enters). But Asami’s hair is pulled back, tied away from her face but for a few strands of hair that hang, perilously, over her face and eyes. She looks up at the sound of Korra’s footsteps.

“Can’t sleep again, huh?”

“Nah. Just—” Korra stifles a yawn with her hand. “—some bad dreams.” 

Asami raises an eyebrow before dropping her head again, bending over the up-ended piece of equipment. “Maybe you should get that looked at,” she suggests, a twitch of her lips indicating the joke, but Korra doesn’t say anything. She flops instead over the table next to which Asami is working, folding her arms in front of her and resting her head against them. 

“Whatever,” Korra mumbles, staring half-lidded at the wall instead of the other girl. “It’s not like I’ll be sent off to fight a kaiju any time soon, thanks to Tenzin.”

Asami places a screw between her teeth and waits to finish adjusting something before she spits it out and responds. “I wouldn’t be certain…” she murmurs. Korra narrows her eyes at her friend, but she’s interrupted by another jaw-cracking yawn before she can question the statement.

“Well, then wha’ about you?” she asks, not bothering to cover her mouth as the yawn goes through her. “What are you doing awake?”

Asami sighs, running the heel of her hands across her cheeks. One leaves a streak of grease under her eye, like an odd choice of rouge along her cheekbones. “I have to get these repairs done on Agni Furo and the jaeger flown in with the Japan shutdown, but I’m supposed to be setting up compatibility tests at 0700 this morning, and there’s no telling how long I’ll be needed. My dad was supposed to be back by now—I’ve just been doing all the legwork ever since he started talking to those brothers from Vancouver about tech upgrades. I wish they’d get back to actually do them, but here I am.”

Korra lifts her head a little. “Compatibility tests?”

"Yeah, for the Iwamoto pair from Japan," Asami says, fumbling at the pile of tools behind her back. "I don’t know exactly what the deal is or why they don’t have test results from Tokyo, but now that we have a new jaeger, we need to assign pilots as soon as possible.”

“They’re not being tested with each other? Wouldn’t they already be assigned to the one that came in with them?”

“Well, we have them and a jaeger but they’re not the pilots, are they?”

Korra hums in acknowledgement but doesn’t respond, dropping her face back into the curve of her arms on the table in front of her.

Tenzin had told her very little about the rangers arriving from Tokyo except that they were brothers. One would have hardly been able to tell, she thinks. One brother has the build of a ranger born to carry the weight of a jaeger, but his eyes too wide and bright. He had kept up a steady stream of conversation throughout their tour of their new home, commenting with enthusiasm on everything from the bustle of the last shatterdome active in the Eastern hemisphere to Korra’s collection of dog tags. The other had been all but silent. He’s the opposite of his brother in many ways, taller and leaner and sharper, and he had spoken only once: to comment at Bolin’s questions about her track record as a ranger, that he didn’t remember hearing anything about her being responsible for taking down a kaiju any time recently. Korra grinds her teeth (she could have been, had Tenzin allowed it, and that didn’t mean she didn’t still have the most experience of any ranger in PPDC history) and absentmindedly brings an arm over her shoulder to rub her fingers over the rough, raised skin across her shoulder blade.

Maybe that was why they were the only blood-related rangers Korra had met never to drift together. She wouldn’t want to have him in her head, either.

“So what jaeger did we get from Japan?” she finally asks.

Asami smiles, leaning back a few inches and running her cloth rag over the surface again. “An old Mark 3,” she says, and Korra looks up in surprise. She hasn’t seen a Mark 3 since the introduction of the next two generations of jaegers, even on the Western side of the Pacific. “They haven’t been able to deploy it in years, of course,” Asami adds, “but you might know this one: first rolled out in Anchorage a decade ago, a relatively little one named Naga Siren. They didn’t tell you? You’re the only one with experience in a jaeger this size and speed. Whoever gets to pilot this one has to fit with you.”

“They didn’t tell me,” Korra murmurs, standing up straight from her hunched-over position over the table. “You’re kidding.”

"Not at all," Asami assures her. “I think even Tenzin’s starting to get desperate.” Anticipating an offended reaction from Korra at her implication that Tenzin would only allow her the jaeger with no other choice, she raises her hands and sits back on her heels. “I… didn’t mean it how that sounded. I just think he’s stressed enough even to have us scrap together jaegers we once had retired. There’s only one other shatterdome besides us still running, and there’s no way people are going to make it far inland and be able to build a wall before the kaiju do something big. We’re barely holding on as it is already.”

“I can hold on,” Korra says immediately. “Tenzin knows I’m the best hope to hold the kaiju back.”

"You know, even if Marshal Gyaltsen didn’t exactly tell you, I’m pretty sure he and my dad have been talking about it since we got news of the transfer. And weren’t you complaining that Beifong was pushing you harder than usual in combat training this week?”

"How was I supposed to know that meant anything?" Korra complains, and Asami laughs and tosses her oil-blackened rag into a bin.

"Come on," Asami says. "I’m going to wash up, and then let’s get something to eat. The mess hall should be opening soon, and I can tell you what I know over breakfast."

——-

Breakfast is a short affair, despite Asami’s promise of information, as both girls nearly exhaust themselves of talk before the mess hall opens and they have access to food and drink. Korra nearly falls back asleep in her scrambled eggs, her chin slipping from the hand on which she’s propped it on the table, until Asami nudges her back into alertness. Korra only grumbles her thanks for the save as she blinks herself back awake (the early morning walks, building in number, are doing nothing for her) and stares at her tray until her stomach grumbles for her attention.

Korra picks the last half of a bagel off her tray and reaches for a knife with her free hand. She stops in mid-reach, her eyes trained on the entrance to the mess hall, which grows more and more crowded as the clock ticks toward the time the shatterdome wakes and begins its day. Asami, sitting next to her, turns to see what’s caught Korra’s attention, too. 

The Japanese ranger brothers approach the food line, one predictably wide awake and smiling and the other with his hair unbrushed and his eyes trained in a scowl at the floor. When Korra looks at him, he lifts his head, as though he can feel her eyes on his back. The look he gives her across the heads and the chatter of the room is steady and direct—until his mouth tugs down in a frown, and he puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder and says something to him, turning both their backs on the girls across the hall.

Korra’s mouth hangs open only for a few seconds before she crams the whole bagel, unbuttered, into her mouth and stands.

“Hey, Korra—”

Asami reaches across the table for Korra’s arm, but Korra draws it back. She takes the bagel out of her mouth instead and responds through her mouthful. “I’m going to Kwoon. Coming?”

Asami shakes her head. “I’m still eating, and I have those tests at seven. You go ahead.” 

She needs no further urging. Suddenly brimming with an irritation she can’t explain, Korra turns on her heel, angrily chewing her breakfast as she stalks from the mess. She’s had about two words total with the older Iwamoto brother and seen him just as many, too, but neither time had she gotten the impression he’s a particularly friendly person. At least the day before, fresh off the helicopter and likely tired and overwhelmed from the trip, Korra didn’t have to mind his reticence; this morning he’d looked at her as though seeing something he didn’t like, and Korra doesn’t like  _that,_ either. With her record and his lack of one, it isn’t as though he has any right to decide anything on her reputation alone.

With one Iwamoto on her mind, it’s the younger who interrupts Korra’s thoughts halfway down the hall. At the sound of her name she turns to see Bolin Iwamoto waving and running to catch up with her.

“Wow!” Bolin exclaims as he jogs the final steps to catch up with Korra. “Ranger Korra Grey! I know I met you yesterday, but I didn’t really get to  _meet_  meet you. You know, with the tour, and that Gyaltsen guy looming over us looking like we’re all going to be flattened at any moment. I just really wanted to say—you know, good morning.”

His English is fluent but accented from lack of constant use or practice. Korra presses her knuckles against her mouth as she swallows another mouthful of bagel and laughs. “Well, good morning, Bolin.” She gestures down the hall, opposite the direction of the mess hall. “I’m headed to the Kwoon Combat Room for some early morning warm up. You want to come?”

“Ooh! Yes!” His eyes are bright as he bounces on his toes. “Good thing I brought some food with me.” He holds up what looks like a few pieces of toast wrapped in a napkin is his hands. “I’d try to get Mako to come, too, but he said he just wanted to—” Bolin drops his voice to what Korra assumes is meant to be a rough, husky imitation of his brother. “—be left alone to eat his breakfast in peace.”

Korra laughs again, shoving her hands in her pockets as she starts walking again. Bolin’s imitation fits perfectly in her snapshot impressions of his brother from the past twelve hours. 

“He sounds real pleased to be here.”

Bolin stays at her side, following as she walks toward the elevator at the end of the hallway, weaving through a steady trickle of people coming late to breakfast. “Nah, that’s just Mako. He just doesn’t like sudden changes that he wasn’t anticipating.” He steps to let someone hurry between them, still talking over the heads of passing people. “But he can’t complain too much, right? We’re here, we still have a roof over our heads, and we got to meet you. I’d say things would almost be looking up, if we weren’t still waiting for giant monstrous sea creatures to try to eat us every minute of the day.”

He’s a morning jolt of energy—better than the coffee Tenzin made a fourteen-year-old Korra swear off for good years ago, when she’d tried to join the adults in debriefing, carrying steaming mugs of black coffee that had led her to caffeine crashes in the middle of simulation battles. Korra feels herself smiling, her mood lifting higher than it should be at 6:30 in the morning with only four hours of sleep. “Oh, I don’t know. I think this place could use a shakeup.  _I_  could use the excitement, at least, though I don’t think the Marshal would be quite as pleased.”

The elevator doors slide open the moment Korra hits the call button on the wall. The lift rattles, and she looks over at him as they begin to rise. Bolin is finishing off his last few pieces of toast, licking butter and cinnamon from his fingertips. He’s both older and younger than she would have expected him to be: younger in his easygoing temperament, so cheerful early in the morning in a location where he could be attacked by giant monsters any moment; and older in hs build. Bolin clearly has the muscle required to step into a pilot suit. He’s nearly bursting with it, a nineteen-year-old who’s only just discovered he can pack it on to impressive sizes, and she assumes he knows how to fight to have gotten this far. Not to mention—and more importantly—he’s  _friendly._  Much better on first impression than his brother.

“Hey,” Bolin says, and Korra blinks back to attention. “You know, why haven’t I heard any reports of your jockey missions lately? You used to be all over the news, ‘ _Youngest, most experienced ranger defeats another kaiju!’_  and all that stuff, but since you left your station in Panama,  _nothing._  What’s it been—top secret underwater missions directly taking on the kaiju before they even come on surface? Spying missions with the deputy marshal?”

He’s gesturing widely with his hands, glancing at Korra and clearly anticipating some sort of confirmation at his guesses, or at least a non-answer that would confirm them anyway. Korra feels hot. She looks at her feet instead of him. She hadn’t expected him to ask—but maybe she should have, when she thinks about it. 

Even Bolin’s excitement doesn’t prevent him from noticing the sudden drop in energy in the tiny room of the elevator that clangs its way up toward the combat practice room. But her silence lasts only a moment, and Korra leans against a wall and crosses her arms. “Ever since the UN announced the Move, willing recruits aren’t exactly in abundance, and drift compatible partners aren’t just signing up right into our hands any more.” 

Her gaze flicks over to him. He almost looks upset with Korra’s answer, that it wasn’t something more intriguing, and she feels one corner of her mouth pull back up. _Excitement_ —that’s what she’s been missing. And Bolin certainly has plenty of the energy.

“Well, yeah, but—”

The floor jerks into stillness, and the doors slide open. Bolin backs out into the hall, still eyeing Korra with confusion. She eyes back.  “What about you? I heard you and your brother aren’t making the connection that Toza expected.”

Bolin sighs, his shoulders drooping as he scratches the back of his head. “Nah. Mako won’t even try. He just says something about how he ‘doesn’t think that would be a good idea’ any time someone brings it up. I don’t get it.”

Korra twists her lips. Had Mako jockeyed before, Korra might have been able to guess at any number of things that would keep him from wanting to strap himself back into a jaeger with his mind open to a partner, but from what she knows, he’d never successfully drifted with anyone, despite passing numerous compatibility tests with his brother. His gaze across the mess hall flashes through her mind again—his even stare before he’d turned him and Bolin away.

Korra takes Bolin’s arm and pulls him forward, down a half step and into the combat room. “I know a thing or two about piloting. Why don’t you give me a shot?”

For all his size, Bolin looks as though he feels dwarfed as he raises his head to stare around Kwoon, a place that seems to Korra just a worn-out room where she’s spent too many hours and days memorizing the stains on the concrete walls and the holes in the faded red mats beneath their feet. She can tell he’s not sure where to point his open jaw as awe hits him all at once: at the  _number_  of trainees active in the room, at Kwoon Fighmaster Lin Beifong watching with her arms crossed from a corner, or at Korra herself, with the offer extended for Bolin to test how they might be compatible as partners within a jaeger. He makes a number of high-pitched, strangled sounds before he finally exclaims, “Would I  _ever!_  This is  _nothing_  like Tokyo— _man!_  I love Hong Kong!”

Two barefoot trainees pause in their wrestling match to look up from the floor as Bolin and Korra pass them by. Korra tucks her dog tags under her shirt before stripping out of it. Already barefoot, she points first to Bolin’s shoes, then to the trainees untangling themselves at the interruption. “No shoes on the mats,” she says—smiling as though she knows she should have mentioned that to him six feet sooner.

Bolin drops to untie his boots, and Korra leaves him in the middle of the combat area for the wall, where she picks up two wooden staffs from the pile leaning against the wall. As she runs her thumb along the wood (newly painted, she notices—barely any scuffs in the color, a change from even the week before), she feels a hand curl around her elbow. Korra turns, meeting Lin Beifong’s steely gaze.

“Take this seriously,” Beifong tells her.

Korra’s good mood vanishes in an instant. Her jaw clenches, lips twitching as she tries to decide on the best way to respond in the least amount of time. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just thought I’d blow off any responsibility to the world by not  _seriously_  wanting the first guy who’s walked into this room in years that you  _haven’t_  yet told me can’t be my partner.” 

She tries to tug her elbow back into her possession. Beifong holds on more tightly.

“Ranger.” Beifong doesn’t blink when she talks, and she cuts off any protests that start to fall from Korra’s open mouth. “Feel him out. If you need to dial it back, then _dial it back._ ”

Korra knows as well as Lin that her friendly meet-and-greet fight with Bolin is not just that. It’s an evaluation, and it’s not just for Korra to see, after a few friendly rounds, how Bolin fights so she can later adapt to his style. They don’t have time to spare: Korra has to perform well with Bolin under the Fightmaster’s eye the first time she lands a blow with him. 

She jerks her arm out of Beifong’s grip and doesn’t say a word.

“All right, let’s get to it!” Bolin finishes with his shoes and hops to his feet. “…Whatever ‘it’ is, exactly.”

Korra turns away from Beifong, tossing one of the wooden staffs to Bolin over the heads of the others training in the room. Bolin nearly fumbles it in surprise, but he catches it; Korra jogs back over to stand in front of him, the other staff still in her own hand. She points to the thin white lines on their mat below, still barely visible after years of being worn by use. 

“We start in the middle. I can’t cross that other line behind you unless I push you past it, first—same goes for you and this one behind me. The goal is to take up as much space of the mat as possible. First to be pushed off the back of their side loses.”

Bolin shrugs, dropping down into a squat in order to stretch his legs. “That sounds easy enough.”

Korra rolls her shoulders and tips her head back, grinning halfway up the wall behind Bolin’s shoulder without looking directly at him. “I wouldn’t be so certain, new guy.”

Bolin cracks his neck and motions that he’s ready the moment he’s straight back on his feet. Korra lets him make the first move.

Bolin is a mountain of muscle, but Korra notes with some surprise after only a few blows that he defies his own build with his movements. He doesn’t rely on his bulk: he’s surprisingly light on his feet, and though he’s awkward with his staff (Korra ducks under an attempted blow and notes, while she strikes out at his shins, that he drops one hand from his grip when he retaliates), he’s quick, and he adjusts. So he’s used to hand-to-hand combat, she guesses, but by the way he holds his arms not a formal martial art like the kind Tenzin and Beifong had her training in since she was thirteen.

But despite Bolin’s strength and size, despite the unexpected quickness on his toes, Korra notices one thing: that he always anticipates the same kind of quick, careful assault that he delivers. And she can do more than simply hold him back.

She lets Bolin step over the center line in the mat, taking two full steps back without looking to judge the distance to the second line behind her. Thinking he’s gaining traction, Bolin hurries forward, his next blow overeager. Korra raises her arms and blocks. Bolin bears down, and she lets him push her into a squat until he pulls back to hit again.

In the brief opening, Korra surges up. She catches Bolin on the wrist with her staff, and he winces, giving her enough of a hesitation to ram her shoulder into his chest. She feels the breath whoosh from his lungs as he stumbles back across the center line, and Korra is there in one jump, pulling back for three quick strikes—and Bolin is sitting on the second line on his side of the mat, her staff hovering inches above his head.

“Point,” Beifong calls. Korra looks over in her direction, briefly—she’s standing closer than she was to the center of the room, arms still crossed over her chest and eyes still narrowed, but without the support of the wall. A few of the other pairs have stopped to take a break from their warm ups, standing or sitting next to Lin and watching with her. Korra Grey and the new kid: she’s sure it’s a show of interest.

Korra lowers her staff and holds out a hand to Bolin, who takes it with a look of gratitude and shakes out his other hand—the one that she’d hit—as soon as he’s standing. “You  _are_  as good as I thought,” he informs her, “and you hit  _hard.”_

She blows a stray strand of hair from eyes. “You have a few tricks you could show me, yourself,” she replies, and she means it: she wants to see how Bolin fights without the staff, without the strict katas and drills and routines she practices every day.

“Back on the line, you two,” Beifong orders, and Korra turns, pacing a small circle to shake herself out before she faces Bolin at the line again. As she walks, she can see the crowd in the wide archway entrance has grown a little; another Iwamoto brother slouches against it now, staring at the floor.

“Ready?” she asks Bolin. Bolin nods.

This time he’s more ready for her when they meet. His stance is stronger, more solid, and he blocks this time more than he dodges. It’s a good adjustment, and Korra finds herself missing a few of his blows only at the last minute. He doesn’t signal his attacks before he makes them, she notices. She appreciates that.

But Bolin still doesn’t land any points, even if he  _nearly_  lands one or two. Korra keeps her eyes narrow and her breathing steady, using her staff to keep a distance between them while she backs up and circles him instead of coming in close to attack. She sizes him up while Bolin finds his breath—and then she makes a split second decision.

Korra rolls, easily hitting the mat and coming in close to Bolin from below. She has his staff between her legs and wrenched out of his grasp before he knows what’s happened, and then she throws both his and hers away from them, not paying any attention to where they’ve been sent. Still close to the ground, Korra grabs his ankles and pulls.

She almost succeeds in knocking him to the ground, but he recovers just in time. She rolls out of his way and dodges a quick bare-fisted punch.  _Now_  she can see Bolin’s more natural style, but she’s already thrown him off, and it’s easy to turn her momentum against him and break through his close-armed defense. It takes only a few blows. Korra backs him to the edge and with one well-placed kick sends him off his side.

She smiles.

Bolin is gasping dramatically, a hand pressed over his chest as a few fellow trainees approach to pat him on the back for “holding up well while going through the ringer his first time,” but his face looks anything but put-out—if a little out of breath. 

“That—was— _awesome!”_  he finally gets out, still not straightened back to his full height. Both he and Korra are grinning, but it’s Bolin who lifts his shirt to wipe the sweat from his face. “You’re a natural at this,” he says, enthusiastic. 

"Thanks," Korra responds, but the satisfied upward curve of her lips tells anyone watching that she already knows that’s the case without Bolin’s telling her. 

“I’ve fought a few tough battles, myself, but you might even be more of a natural than Mako. Hey, Mako!” Bolin spots his brother and waves off the other people around him, hurrying over to the other side of the room to report on his spar with Korra Grey.

And for once, Korra feels excited after a fight, too. She’s more skilled than Bolin—that much is clear—but he had kept up with her better than any last few partners she can remember. And it was  _fun._

Her mistake is in turning to Beifong.

Lin’s face is sharp, pulled down and together into a scowl that pierces, once more, through Korra’s rare good morning mood. Behind her, Korra can see the two staffs that must have been the ones she and Bolin were using: one slid against a half-knocked over pile of other staffs, the other almost against the side wall. Korra steps toward her. 

“That was good,” she says, already balling her fists at her side. “Lin, you know that was  _good.”_

“For him, maybe,” Beifong says shortly.

Ignoring company, Korra raises her voice. “What’s the problem with my winning?”

“That’s not the problem, Ranger, and you know it. He’s good, but it’s the same problem you’ve had with every other partner, and his personality isn’t going to match it. He’s not the one for you.”

Beifong turns her back on Korra, and Korra stomps her foot in frustration that Lin has learned throughout the years how to delay or ignore Korra’s retorts to her unfair declarations. She hunches her back, storming through the milling PPDC staff in the room until she’s close enough to take a deep breath and tap Bolin on the shoulder, calming the expression on her face before he turns back around.

“Well?” Bolin asks, eager, and Korra does her best to ignore the amber-eyed glare of his brother behind him. 

“Lin’s not fully sold on us just yet, but if we do this again tomorrow, I bet we can change her mind.” Korra’s lie is told cheerfully, but desperately. She wants to  _fight_ —she wants to stand in a jaeger cockpit where she’s stood her entire life and do what she was raised to do, but without a partner who can even somewhat hold his own, she can’t even consider putting on a drift suit without the cost of her own life. “Asami will have a break after lunch and she can help me show you some moves. And I’d like to learn some from you, too, so we’re more prepared tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t believe you’re even  _considering_  this!” Bolin says, laughing, and Korra curls one palm over one fist and salutes him. Bolin returns the gesture.

“I’ll see you in a few hours, then. I’m going to find a more private space to practice for a bit.”

It’s another lie: she’s determined to find Tenzin before Lin gets to him and convince him that Bolin is an option, that he should watch them. But Korra waves and dashes before Bolin can respond, leaving him to turn back to Mako and throw an arm around his brother’s shoulder.

“You sure missed something great,” Bolin tells Mako in Japanese, shaking his head in mock disappointment.

Mako doesn’t try to remove Bolin’s hold, but he doesn’t return it, either, staring at the scattered staffs across the room instead. “I saw enough. Bro, she’s dangerous. You don’t want this.”

“Are you  _kidding?”_  Bolin puts his spare hand on Mako’s other shoulder, turning Mako to face him. “Of course she’s dangerous! She’s Korra Grey, most jaegers piloted and most kaiju dropped in PPDC history! This is what we’ve been training for!”

Mako meets Bolin’s gaze evenly. “Not the right kind of dangerous that we’re looking for, Bolin,” he says, and he pushes Bolin’s arms and turns away.


	4. three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’ve already lost everything there is to lose, Ranger. So you can plug yourself in and trust just one person in this world, you can stand and fight in the cockpit of a jaeger, or you can wait for the kaiju to chew you up and shit you out.”

The fight is far more subdued than day before. With Tenzin observing from the steps outside the ring, the training area clears for Korra’s and Bolin’s uninterrupted use. But the possibility of a new pilot team is always a cause for excitement in the post-glory days of the shatterdomes. Onlookers gather on all sides, but they are mostly silent, leaving the room to be filled only by the sound of Korra’s and Bolin’s grunts of exertion and the clack of wood on wood from their staffs. Tenzin and Lin call out occasionally with suggestions: each time Korra reacts visibly, her jaw becoming tighter and her eyebrows pulling further and further together.

She twirls her staff across her center, judging the short distance between herself and Bolin as they circle the ring. He has his right side at her, guarding his front with both hands on the staff as he takes each step with caution. He shifts to his left side as he passes the entrance, and as his foot is halfway to the ground, she leaps forward, lashing out in a strike so powerful it almost throws his weapon to the floor. Bolin adjusts himself from the blow, and she smiles.

Point for her.

“Dial it back, Ranger Grey,” Tenzin calls. “Remember: fit your moves to match your partner.”

The smile fades with the comment and she draws her shoulders up, tense and tight around her neck, turning away from Bolin. She faces around at the other end of the ring, lifting the staff at an angle beside her head while Bolin takes his place across from her, wiping the sweat from his eyes as he mimics her stance.

They begin again. The blows they exchange are small and quick, sharp jabs coming from all sides. Bolin keeps pace on defense, but every time she hears the snap of their staffs she’s already moving for another place and driving him back with each blow. It’s only until he’s a step away from the crowd that he’s able to keep her staff in place for a second longer to push her back over the ring.

He closes the distance with a bounding leap and swings down before she can strike again. Instead of dodging, Korra blocks his staff directly with hers, placing them in a deadlock as they struggle against the other. Korra sticks her foot to the floor, pushing with all her might so she can knock him back. But Bolin is stronger than she could have guessed, and with a burst of strength hidden in his arms, he pushes her staff down and brings her knees to the floor.

The point won for his favor, Bolin breathes hard as he places his staff to his side, offering her a hand and a smile in compensation for beating her that round. Breathing deep and even, Korra locks the tips of her fingers on his as she stands from the ground.

Lin is frowning. Barely glancing up from the clipboard held in front of her, shespeaks.

“Stop joking around, Rangers.”

Korra groans, loudly, and her foot sweeps on the floor as she faces the fight master.

"I pushed him back straight across the ring,” she says, motioning to Bolin with her staff. “Did that look like a joke to you?”

Lin hides the board behind her back, tilting her chin into her neck as she looks on the Rangers with steel-grey eyes.

“You could’ve ended that round long before he knocked you back,” she says. “But you got the upper hand and kept going with it, you pushed him into the corner to see what he would do, and once he got away you chose offense over defense to compare your strengths. And you,” Lin looks at Bolin. “You need to strike the second you see an opening. Don’t let her push you around and give you one, because a kaiju won’t.”

“I’m striking hard and fighting back–that’s what you  _trained_  me to do!” Korra snaps. “This isn’t Bolin’s fault.”  

"It is his fault,” Lin says flatly. “He doesn’t have the ability to pick up your slack.”

Korra steps from her place beside Bolin, glaring at the official with a heated tinge in her cheeks. Her staff arm twitches, shaking with pent-up rage, and after a moment’s hesitation she raises the end directly at Lin. The room fills with whispers, but Lin remains as still as the stone the shatterdome is carved from, not even shifting her eyes to the weapon aimed at her head.

“I’ve piloted that jaeger for years, and no matter how much you pick apart everything I do, you know I’m going to be in it when the next kaiju attacks. I’m the best ranger you’ve got in this shatterdome, so why don’t one of you get in the ring and just  _tell_ me what to do while I’m fighting? It’ll save you the trouble of correcting me when I do it all wrong!”

Her voice echoes off the walls, and the room is silent.

“You’ve had partners before, Ranger–you know exactly what this is. Every time you overstep, he lets you go. If he can’t keep up with you in the ring, he’ll never be able to keep up in the Drift.”

Korra says nothing. Bolin–almost forgotten–glances around with a nervous tick to his hands and finally speaks.

“Um, if I may–”

But Korra barrels through him, suddenly recovered from her moment of shock, and pushes him aside to move toward Lin–but Tenzin steps between them

“That’s  _enough,_  Korra!” Tenzin finally cuts in, his voice lancing loud and hard across the room. “It is not your responsibility to decide what is and isn’t a good decision when there are millions of lives on the line.”

Korra flinches, her mouth twisting into a hard scowl as she slowly steps back. Her stance is less ready for a physical attack, but her staff still shakes in her grasp. Lin crosses her arms behind Tenzin’s frame, the clipboard bouncing against her elbow.

Korra lowers her eyes to the floor. When she speaks, her voice is an angry mutter compared to the shouts that bounced on the walls moments before. “This isn’t about anyone else,” she says, lifting her eyes at Tenzin. “Admit it.”

Tenzin frowns, but is otherwise unfazed by Korra’s words. Instead his eyes scan over the room, only now seeming to notice their audience.

“All right,” Tenzin barks at them. “That’s enough for today. Everyone clear the room!”

Seconds pass, and the crowd begins to move and their murmured voices swell as they jostle along the walls toward the exit and milling around equipment racks and walls, still trying to watch the conflict before them. Korra remains fixed in her place, glaring at Tenzin and Lin both. Bolin, who has been standing silently, awkwardly, for most of the exchange, twists his hands around his staff and watches the room clear, clearly uncertain if he should go with the slow-moving masses or not.

“Well…” he says, looking between Korra and Lin. “This–this is a really great discussion and all, wow, but maybe it would be even better if I just–”

He takes a step toward the exit, but the hard wood of Korra’s staff over his chest stops him in his path. She doesn’t look at him.

“We’re not done here,” she says, still glaring at Tenzin and Lin.

“I think we are.” Lin steps forward, the steel-heeled soles of her boots clicking loud against the concrete steps, the only other noise in the otherwise-crowded combat room where onlookers remained jostled against the walls. “I advise you get out of my training room until your head has cooled off for good, Ranger.”

Lin turns to leave and Tenzin is quick on her heels behind her with nothing spared for Korra but a single, cold-eyed look.

Korra drops her head into her hands, curls her fingers into her hair and makes a muffled, low-pitched, wordless noise.  The combat room hasn’t completely emptied, and those who remain are quick to step away from her path as she paces blindly, hair covering her eyes. “You can’t just–” She spins, following Lin’s movement past her as she turns toward Bolin. “We’ll– _Bolin–”_

Korra spins around and throws the red-painted staff hard across the room. Bolin flinches as it ricochets off the floor near him and clatters on the mat. The gesture helps her pent-up frustration, but only somewhat, and with a heavy sigh she crosses the room to retrieve it–only for a pair of feet laced in military-grade boots to step in front of her right when she’s bending down to take it.

With the staff in her hand, she stands with a slowness to her shoulders as she lifts her head to face him. Arms crossed over his chest, Mako looks down at her with a stern expression that would rival even Tenzin’s.

“You need to _calm down,”_  Mako says.

Korra scoffs and would have turned away but for a tug on her staff that makes her stop.

She bristles and whirls around once more to face Mako, staring a full head and shoulders above her into his eyes. Mako is glaring, holding her back, and though Korra’s already forgotten his brother’s presence behind her, her head is ringing with the thought that this has absolutely  _nothing to do with him_. She tries to yank the staff out of his hands, but Mako doesn’t budge, only the whitening around his knuckles an indication that he holds on even more tightly when she pulls.

Something in her  _snaps._

It’s the buildup of months of inaction, of twiddling her thumbs while other people are sent to do the job she was  _raised_  to do, of criticism and lack of partners and now, worst of all, someone who’s never even fought a kaiju in his life staring her down and telling her to be calm.

Time slows around the heat in Korra’s face, the room blurring and narrowing so the only color that leaps is the red of her fingers wrapped around the painted wood of the weapon, the red of  the mat where he stands still in his boots only inches away from her, and the painted writing on the wall that splatters halfway up and down the dirty brown concrete with every stroke. The center point is Mako. So Korra moves.

The shift of balance is sudden. She throws her weight against him and should have made him stumble, but Mako is still standing and holding, infuriatingly, onto the staff. Nobody takes it. But when Korra leans back to swing a well-placed kick below, using her double hold on the staff to keep her upright with Mako’s weight as a counterbalance, Mako decides that he would rather not be kicked that morning—and for the first time she can remember, Korra feels the ground pulled out from under her and placed suddenly above her head instead. She finds herself flipped and thrown and sitting firmly on her rear with her hands still clutching the staff above her head.

She doesn’t hear the sudden sound that rises and falls among the lingering onlookers in the room.

Korra is frozen in shock only for a moment. Her recovery is quick and instantaneous, and with one sharp yell she throws the whole of her body weight on the staff toward the ground. This time Mako is the one who isn’t ready. He stumbles, giving Korra enough time to haul herself to her feet and rush toward him, linking a hold she’ll use to throw him to the ground this time. But instead of resisting, Mako falls–rolls onto his back and brings Korra with him, so that in the moment that she curls her hands around his upper arms he twists his legs with hers and flips them both.

Korra takes a breath as Mako presses down, sinking into the floor with him before she rises up with one palm flat against his chest. Mako lets out his own breath and she snakes her free hand around his shoulders, grabs his hair, and  _pulls._

At Mako’s yell, Lin and Tenzin reappear at the doorway, doubling back at the sound of a fight. Lin assesses the situation and starts forward; but Tenzin holds out an arm to stop her path.

“Wait,” he says, not taking his wide eyes from the scene in the room below. “Just wait.”

Pain and pressure on Mako’s scalp yanks his head back, giving Korra the opportunity to shove him away and flip herself upright. She doesn’t wait for him to recover and is back on the attack, not just trying to pin him down but ready to hit. Mako barely rolls over in time. He holds out an arm to guard his face, blocking Korra’s blows while he kicks her in the stomach. She falls back, and he takes the split second to right himself before they’re a mix of blows and blocks.

His rhythm is similar to Bolin’s–short, quick, and rarely steady–but unlike his brother, Mako does not get overeager at a moment’s opening, and Korra is harder pressed to break through his own defenses. He controls his breath and watches Korra’s arms and stomach tense and flex before she strikes. Still, she picks up on his movements, on the close-fisted jabs and the position of his arms, and finds herself calculating how to break and disrupt him. A few more moves (catch his fist when he strikes–there, twist and hold his arm–duck and rise, through the shield he makes in front of his chest) and she will have him, his dog tags swinging over his shoulder onto hers, hot against her bare skin as she wraps her arms around him. She is perfect in the shape and curve of his torso so he cannot wiggle from her grasp, her own breathing modulated to the rise and fall of his chest–and this time, she doesn’t let him fall.

Korra shifts her weight with Mako’s, and for just a moment, her stance is not steady. She hangs against his weight, against the height he carries to his advantage, and as she ducks to flip him over her shoulder, Mako thinks about moving. He can have her on her back.

The moment passes, and suddenly Mako finds the breath knocked out of his lungs when he lands on his back instead. Korra shoves him down all the way, his head bumping against the mat, and sits on his legs with a hand pressed firmly against his chest.

“You’re not so great, after all,” she gasps, chest heaving for air as she pushes her weight into her arms to hold him down.

“And neither are you,” Mako says, forcing his voice through his contorted position as he cranes his neck to look at her. “This isn’t just your fight.”

For a moment Korra looks as though she’s going to hit him.

"At least I can drift,” she says finally—and there it is. “You know which one of us is out there at every attack, risking her life in the very machine that’s built to protect it? You know which one of us has climbed into every cockpit, stood her ground to every kaiju that’s tried to take us down? So don’t lecture me, hot-shot—you’re the one who’s so damn scared of a handshake that he can’t even drift with his own brother.”

She tosses the staff away from her, not even looking to see where it lands; it clatters and rolls on the concrete floor. Mako doesn’t move as she rolls off him and stands, turning her back and passing through the silent, onlooking crowd. He’s too busy biting his tongue, his jaw clenched so tight he can already feel dull pains along his skull.

Bolin kneels to help his brother up, but Mako’s attention to him is at a minimum. He’s looking forward instead–watching the back of Tenzin’s blue coat as he follows Korra through the door, the color stark against the dull browns of Kwoon.

Nobody stops to tell her she’s wrong.

**********

She knows he’s following her.

“I don’t need to hear it, Tenzin,” Korra snaps over her shoulder, not stopping or slowing as she storms as far from the combat room as she can manage. “I already know I broke regulation.”

She’s still barefoot, her boots left behind on the practice mats, but Tenzin’s own shoes are loud and sharp against the concrete as he speeds his own pace to match hers. She quickens her step, too, but he grabs her shoulder and turns her around before she can get any further.

Tenzin looks at her with the same stern, narrow-eyed look she’d come to know from him over the years and her mouth is already open, ready with retort, her eyes slitted and nose scrunched, but his next words catch her off guard.

“I’m not here to talk about that.”

Korra’s face relaxes just enough so she can raise one brow in response, her shoulders tense and drawn as his hand remains curled around her arm. She casts her eyes at the wall, refusing to look him in the eyes and Tenzin sighs–hesitates for a moment–and lets her go. She jerks her shoulder back as soon as he does, angling her body away so that she’s half twisted toward the end of the hall. She looks down it with a narrow scope, as though to track out her escape route; but she stays as Tenzin continues to speak.

“We’ll get this sorted out, Korra,” he says. “We just want to make sure it’s what’s right for you and for all of us. If you would just have a little more patience, you’d remember that.”

She whirls around at him.

“I  _have_  been patient! I’ve been patient for eight  _years!”_  she yells. “If you’d bring in some decent pilots instead of greenhorns from Tokyo, we wouldn’t even be in this mess!”

Tenzin’s mouth snaps open to respond before quickly thinking better of it. He composes himself, taking in a deep, long breath before letting it out in an airy hiss.

“Korra–”

_“Marshal!”_

Korra and Tenzin turn, looking down the hall where one of the J-Tech engineers is hunched over a few feet from them, hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath from what must have been an all-out run. Tenzin straightens, pulling himself up to full height as he steps toward the technician.

“What is it?”

“The Lepus Himalaya….” the engineer gasps. “…They’ve returned from Urumqi.”

Tenzin’s brow snaps together. “They were scheduled to stay another four days for repairs. Who authorized their transfer?”

“I don’t know, sir,” he says, throwing a thumb over his shoulder. “But they’re docking in the launch bay right now.”

Tenzin spares Korra a moment’s glance, who’s still stuck halfway between her own anger and desire to meet the jaeger team’s early return. She hesitates; he does not, and drops his gaze to hurry to the hangar without another word.

*********

The hangar is the largest room in the shatterdome, built to house five jaegers and  is always filled with people, but beneath its roof the Lepus Himalaya casts a shadow and a presence that makes even the hangar seem to be bursting at its seams. Even as she follows fast on Tenzin’s heels, Korra can still see jagged pieces of grey beneath Himalaya’s otherwise dark blue paint, torn under its right arm where the kaiju landed a hit. At its feet, as the crowd parts for Tenzin’s approach, Korra’s attention draws down to the excited chatter of a familiar voice: Bolin is looking positively giddy with awe, gesturing excitedly at the jaeger with his brother at his side, and Korra can almost hear his  _“Look, that’s–”_ even through the noise of the crowd. She deliberately turns away before either of them can look in her direction. They’ve had plenty of pilots come and go before with only minor fanfare, so Korra doesn’t know why so many people are  _flocking._

As she and Tenzin walk through the parted crowd she can see Wei and Wing Beifong, the newest successors to Lepus Himalaya’s helm, and Lin’s own nephews–both clearly alive and well. Korra scoffs as the group bends around them, leaning over one another to get a better view. Despite capability in their role as pilots and a well-established family history in the PPDC, they are new to the force with only three drops and three kills to their name. Nothing compared to her own record. They warrant none of this attention.

“Well done on the drop in Urumqi, Rangers,” Tenzin says, greeting the pilots with a small nod. “Despite the head start Biantai had on the coastline, you managed to bring it down with minimal casualty to the civilian population.”

“All in a day’s work,” Wing says with a grin,  sending a quick wink at Korra while Wei brings his hands together, bowing to the commander.

“I’m sorry for the early return, Marshal,” Wei says. “The Brass pushed our transfer early to have us bring public relations.”

Tenzin sighs, bringing a hand to his head. “So that’s what this is all about…”

“Really?” Korra groans. “They bring in reporters  _now?”_

Wing lifts his hands in a shrug. “Hey, we didn’t want them tagging along either. It’s bad enough that they called in no-good rat to lead them around.”

Korra raises her brow.

“A rat?” she asks. “Who?”

“That would be me,” someone cuts in from the side and Korra–recognizing the voice–immediately feels a surge of irritation so strong she could swear it was the sensation of her stomach turning itself inside out. Her head snaps in his direction, and she meets his eyes on point. It’s been years since she’d seen him, but he still carried himself with the same arrogant posture she’d come to expect: his hair greased to the side and his arms akimbo as though asking her for a hug.

She crosses her arms as she turns to him, tilting her chin up in a sharp glare even though he stands a good couple of inches above her.

“Whose bright idea was it to let you back in here, Tahno?”

“Hold on to your jaeger, squirt,” he says, sending a lazy salute in her direction as he walks passed. “I gotta talk to the bossman first before I can stop and chat.”

She grinds her teeth so hard her jaw pops.

“You no good–”

“Korra, please,”Tenzin says, placing a hand on her shoulder as he steps closer to the new arrival. Tahno’s lips curl into a smile, but to her it looks more like a smirk, and she rolls her eyes away from him and her mentor, trying to focus her attention to the group of civilians clustered around the jaeger’s foot. But she can still feel his eyes flicker at her one more time before he gives Tenzin his full attention.

“Ranger Aleyev, this is certainly a surprise,” Tenzin says. “I never thought we’d see you back here after all these years.”

“Well, you know what they say; ‘you can take the Ranger out of the jaeger, but you can’t take the jaeger out of the Ranger.’”

Korra scoffs beneath her breath. If Tahno hears, he makes no indication of it.

“Besides,” he continues. “The Brass needs someone to show these reporters around. Give ‘em the grand tour while they get some footage of the Shatterdome. The public needs to make sure the tax dollars funding this little adventure aren’t going to waste now that it’s all that’s left of the Defense Corps.”

“We have other people to do that,” Korra says, the words spitting from her throat. “More qualified, too. You haven’t been to a Shatterdome in years, why’d they pick _you?”_

Tahno points a thumb at his face. “Poster-boy, remember? Someone’s got to put a pretty face to this operation.”

Korra balls her hands into fists inside her elbows, and Tenzin places another hand on her shoulder. She raises her brow at him, and he holds her look for a moment before looking back to Tahno.

“So long as they don’t interfere with our work, I don’t see any reason not to allow it,” Tenzin says. “Welcome back, Ranger, and good luck.”

Tenzin looks at the command station above them and nods. For a second, everything continues as it had been. Then, the speakers them screech with life, Lin’s voice erupting through the entire room.

“Alright, that’s enough dillydallying!” she says. “Back to your stations, all of you, or we’ll have you working till the next kaiju drops!”

With that, the clustered crowd around them bursts into a swarm as everyone moves to get back to their posts. Tenzin turns and places a hand on each of the Himalaya Rangers, leading them through to the command center to be debriefed on their mission. He looks at her over his shoulder with a stern glance–a warning of some kind, but she rolls it off as he disappears between the rows of technicians and mechanics alike. With nothing important to do, Korra stays by the jaeger’s foot, waiting for the room to clear.

Unfortunately, so does Tahno.

Even with streams of people running between them, he’s hard to ignore. His voice carries over the noise of the room, calling a floor tech over to get rooms ready for the reporters while he turns to the bunch and tells them they’ll begin the tour tomorrow morning. She turns away as the civilians leave, but with the room thinning, she can hear the clack clack clack of his heeled shoes beating on the floor as he heads back toward her. Taking a deep breath through her mouth, she prepares herself for whatever else he has to say. She won’t let it get to her–she’s the one saving the world now. Not him.

But before Tahno can open his mouth, Bolin’s voice bursts beside them like an old waterpipe: “I know you! You’re Tahno!”

The former-pilot smirks at her, and runs a hand through his hair, facing the two brothers as they approach.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he says. “Good to hear my face still gets around after all these years. Of course, being one of the best jaeger pilots in history would do that…”

Some would beg to differ, Korra thinks.

“You must be the Iwamoto brothers,” Tahno says, taking a long look at them. “I heard about your transfer in the news. Shame about Japan… But I guess they had it coming, eh? Couldn’t even turn out two simple rangers who could work together. Guess there was some lousy leadership going on over there. You boys are lucky you got here in one piece.”

Bolin, star-struck and oblivious at the implications of his words, looks at Tahno as though he’d laid a golden egg, but Mako leans back with his arms crossed, staring into Tahno’s face–eyes narrowed and searching, boring into his.

“We did what we had to do,” he says shortly, “and what Marshal Bogdanovic ordered. He made the call that was best for everyone.”

Bolin looks up at Mako with some surprise, his eyes wide and questioning. “I thought you didn’t–” he begins, but Tahno cuts him off with a wave of his hand.

“Whatever, I’ve never heard of brothers who can’t drift with each other…” he says, keeping his eyes on Mako. “It’s easy for me to let someone in: my partner always knew I could take care of whatever punches those kaiju threw. They were there just for support, help keeping those scraps of steel moving.”

Tahno breaks his gaze on Mako to lean toward Bolin, the corner of his mouth curled into a smirk.

“I brought some of my old reels to show everyone here,” he says. “You should watch them, baby Ranger, you might actually get an idea of what it’s like to pilot a jaeger…”

Mako tenses toward Bolin, but before he can say anything Korra grabs hold of Tahno’s shoulder and pushes him to face her.

“They don’t want any of your self-congratulating bullshit, Tahno,” she says. “Bolin and Mako have actual talent and strength–and unlike you, I’d rather you not take that away from them just so you can remember what it was like to feel successful for a brief moment in your life.”

Tahno’s smirk sinks into a scowl, but he bounces back straight away, sweeping his hair back again as he turns to the brothers.

“Better get a hold of those vids quick, cause you won’t get anything out of watching hers,” he says, jerking his thumb at Korra. Her teeth clench together when he faces back at her, slipping his hands into his pockets as he leans close to her face.

“As for you, Ranger Grey… I think I’ll reserve the best ones just for you. If you’re nice, maybe I could even give you a  _private_  viewing…”

Korra puts her head back, narrowing her eyes. Behind him, Mako and Bolin both stare at the old pilot’s exchange. The silence lasts a little too long to be natural, but Tahno stands up as if nothing had happened, taking a long look around the room before settling back on Korra.

“Speaking of success,” he finally says. “or a lack of… what’s changed since I was last here? I assume if you’re in a position to talk to me about that sort of thing, you’ve found yourself another co-pilot by now, yes?”

“That’s none of your business,” she snaps.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” Tahno says, and his smile grows. Stepping to her side on his heel, he throws up a hand as he walks away, wiggling his fingers in a goodbye over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll find you a new playmate by the time the war’s over.”

A low noise escapes her throat, and the brothers flank at her side, an uneasy tension hanging in the air as they watch the ex-pilot walk away. Korra stares until he disappears into the great doors of the hangar bay, and catches Mako’s eye as she turns to the right. His mouth opens as if to say something, but neither of them have a chance to speak as a loud, heavy bang reverberates through the wide atrium of the Shatterdome.

The three turn their attention on the workers unloading cargo surrounding Lepus Himalaya. A ways off from the pile of crates and tanks filled with fleshy goo stands a ring of men gathered around a wooden box that’s been dropped clean on the ground. Two men, both tall and brown-skinned, walk from the cargo pile in great strides to the group.

“Be careful with that!” one of the men barks, dark hair swinging over his neck while the other man stops silently at his side, his presence an added intimidation. The handlers, dressed in jackets with the word K-SCIENCE inscribed on the back, mumble their apologies, eyes cast down on their work as they scramble to put the box right side up.

“Who are they?” Bolin asks.

“Kaiju scientists and bio-harvesters,” Korra explains, looking as the two older men walk back to their place along the cargo pile. “Those two are the heads of the science and research division–Tarrlok and Noatak Okpik. If the kaiju is killed during a drop the body and organs are taken in by the K-Science Division to study for research.”

“How helpful is that if the kaiju have different defenses?” Mako asks. “No two are exactly alike.”

Korra shrugs. “Beats me. All I know is they’re the reason we know what we do about the kaiju. But with how things have been changing lately, there’s a lot of people who aren’t sure how helpful that is anymore.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” Mako mutters, and the three of them all cast their eyes to the jaeger standing tall and still above them. It’s a long moment they’re staring, and Korra can tell they’re all thinking the same thing. It’s the same line of facts she’d been trying to run from, the one she’d been avoiding for weeks and months.

The Jaeger Program is dying–and they are some of the last ones around with a chance at keeping it alive.

**********

Footage of Tahno’s fights and victories against the kaiju are uploaded to the Shatterdome’s mainframe within hours after his arrival. The media station swarms with people gathered around fifteen-inch screens, erupting in cheers and chants as they look at the old brawls, memories of the glory days that have long passed them by.

The room empties as dinner and night shifts begin, but Korra stays, pressed against the cold concrete of the wall as she stands and watches the reels play over and over again across the room. Once alone, she shuts the door and turns down the lights, leaving the videos alone to light the room in a flickering blue. For all Tahno makes Korra want to punch him in the mouth with every word he speaks, there can, unfortunately, be no mistaking that out of all the remaining jaeger pilots alive, his drop and kill count is the highest. Even civilians know it, overloaded with news of his heroics in the media: simply mentioning his name or the his jaeger would be the start of a conversation that could continue for hours.

She mutes the video and sits on the floor, legs drawn to her chest and arms wrapped around her shins. Resting her chin on her knees, Korra studies each video and immerses herself in studying the flow of the battle: the movement of each opponent, when the kaiju strikes, when the jaeger seems at its weakest, and the strongest.

Eight videos go by before someone opens the door at her back, the light spilling over the threshold interrupting her concentration. Korra squints until the door shuts and the lights raise, not looking up as a pair of thin heeled boots click across the floor.

“Hey,” Asami says, pulling out a chair beside her. “I was looking for you all day.”

“I’ve been busy,” Korra replies, motioning to the screen. Asami sighs and leans back in her chair.  

“You can’t let him get to you, you know,” she says. “You know what happened last time. It’ll only make your focus worse.”

“He’s  _not_  getting to me,” Korra grumbles into her knees. “And he won’t. I just want to study it. Something works for him, and I want to know what it is. I  _need_  to know what it is if I ever want a chance at beating one when the time comes. If ever.”

“You’ll get your chance,” Asami says, and her voice is almost urgent. She leans forward and puts a hand on Korra’s shoulder so that Korra looks up to meet her gaze. “Once we find you a co-pilot, you’ll be–”

Korra scoffs.

“As if Tenzin will let me in after all the mess-ups I’ve made,” she says, waving her hand through the air. “I don’t even have a partner, Asami. I can’t fight alone.”

“You’ll find one,” Asami assures her. “You’re one of the best pilots I know.”

Korra rolls her shoulders in a shrug and turns back to the video. Asami says nothing further and, after a moment, sits back with a sigh. On the screen Tahno and his partner Shaozu fight the final moments of their last battle with a category three kaiju, dubbed Ground Driver. When Ground Driver tries ramming the jaeger for the fifth time that fight, the jaeger team already have their plasma blaster pressed against the kaiju’s neck. Shooting it directly, the beast explodes in an impressive flash of blue flesh, and Ground Driver slumps to the ground, its mouth open in a silent scream.

“Maybe I should have tried harder,” Korra mutters, suddenly and quietly, and Asami looks over at her, one eyebrow raised. “Maybe the others–if I’d known my last fight was really going to be the last, I would’ve…”

She trails off. Asami continues to watch her, and the silence continues for a few awkward minutes before they’re interrupted–thankfully–by the sound of the metal door sliding on the floor. Both women turn to see a uniformed LOCCENT official standing in the doorway, clipboard in hand.

“Ranger Grey,” the official calls. “Marshal Gyaltsen requests your presence in conference room one, right away.”

After exchanging a questioning look with Asami, Korra heaves herself out of the chair and follows the LOCCENT officer out the door. She knows where the conference room is and scowls at his back as they walk: not only has she walked past the room in question a thousand times before, but the officer’s pace is akin to an elephant at best, leisurely strolling along and checking the folds of his clipboard every fifteen steps.

To her surprise it isn’t Tenzin standing outside the conference room when she turns a corner into the hallway; it isn’t even Lin. It’s Mako. He catches sight of her a second after she sees him, raising his brow with the same questioning look she’d exchanged with Asami minutes before. Korra returns with a shrug. He looks just as puzzled as she feels: confused to why she’s been summoned in such a regulated way, and even more than that–why was Mako has as well? Are they still in trouble from their fight that morning, she wonders?

Maybe, Korra thinks dryly, Tenzin has called us in personally to finally give us both the boot.

After studying her for a moment longer, Mako lets out a sigh through his nose and pushes the door open. Inside Tenzin and Lin stand hunched over the width of the table, a mess of papers spread out at their fingers. Noting the new arrivals, Tenzin straightens up from the table, stepping toward them with his hands clasped around the front of his jacket.

“Ah. Good,” he says. “You’re both here.”

“Let’s cut to the chase.” Lin pushes her way in front of Tenzin, a steely look in her eye as she turns from Korra to Mako and back again. “Rangers Grey, Iwamoto. Meet your new co-pilot.”


End file.
